George Aratani, a Los Angeles businessman who donated millions of dollars to Japanese American causes, and with his wife endowed the nation's first academic chair to study the World War II internment of people of Japanese descent and their efforts to gain redress, has died. He was 95. An entrepreneur who founded the Mikasa china and Kenwood electronics firms, Aratani died Tuesday at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center of complications of pneumonia, his daughter Linda Aratani said. He had lived at the Keiro nursing facility in Lincoln Heights since last summer.

Togo W. Tanaka, a former journalist and businessman whose reports on life inside the Manzanar internment camp illuminated divisions in the Japanese American community after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the tensions that eventually erupted in riots at the World War II-era detention center, has died. He was 93. Tanaka died of natural causes May 21 at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to his daughter, Christine.

Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian American writers to earn literary distinction after World War II with highly polished short stories that illuminated a world circumscribed by culture and brutal strokes of history, has died. She was 89. Yamamoto had been in poor health since a stroke last year and died in her sleep Jan. 30 at her home in northeast Los Angeles, said her daughter, Kibo Knight. Often compared to such short-story masters as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor and Grace Paley, Yamamoto concentrated her imagination on the issei and nisei, the first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who were targets of the public hysteria unleashed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Shumway complains that the "newly refined thinking to prior actions vis-a-vis the Japanese-American internment and compensation to internees could rekindle prejudices." The internment of Japanese-Americans cannot and should not be compared to "arrestees, pre-Miranda or schoolchildren (separate but equal) before Brown vs. Board of Education. As a patriot and citizen had Shumway been denied his rights under the Constitution and been ousted from his home and placed in an internment camp to be housed in a horse stall, would he have volunteered his services into the U.S. Armed Forces while his parents and family were still incarcerated behind barbed wire fences?

I am shocked that Kevin Thomas chose to end his review of "Rabbit on the Moon" by implying that Japanese American internees should be grateful to the U.S. government for suspending their constitutional rights ("An In-Depth Look at War Internment," Feb. 26). Not only is his comment that "the [internment] camps may have saved some [Japanese Americans] from lynch mobs" unwarranted, it also reeks of the illogic used by apologists for American slavery and the Holocaust. If the majority of society harbors hatred and ill will against a small minority, the problem rests with society and not with the scapegoat.

A new installation at the Japanese American National Museum in L.A. will be dedicated May 31 as a permanent complement to the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism in Washington. The East Coast monument was erected in 2000 to honor Japanese Americans who fought for their country during World War II -- and to commemorate the forced internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during the war. The L.A. memorial consists of a donor wall of glass, steel and concrete, by Fresno designer Sidney Mukai, recognizing those who helped finance the East Coast memorial.

Recently I returned with 64 others from "Jack Chapman's Sentimental Journey to the Philippines," notice of which appeared in your Briefs column several months ago. I was born there, brought up in Manila, married, had two children and spent 37 months in a Japanese internment camp. Jack, in connection with Bur-Cal Travel in Burbank, planned a wonderful tour. Laughter and tears accompanied us as we visited the University of Santo Tomas where we spent those 37 months; the beautiful military cemetery.

The reports of FBI "interviews" of Arab-Americans bode ill for all of us. Unfortunately, governmental activity concerned with the Arab-American community has not been limited to this intimidation tactic. For four years the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been trying to deport several Palestinian peace activists despite the government's acknowledgment that the immigrants have never committed any criminal act. Proceedings are expected to recommence after March 1. Still more chilling is the government's plan, uncovered in the deportation case, to engage in mass roundups, internment and deportations of Arab immigrants "based solely on nationality."

I read "A Provocative Defense of America's WWII's Internment Camps" (March 7) with great interest. Unmentioned in the review of David Lowman's defense of the Japanese internment camps was the little-known Munson Report. The Munson Report was a document based on a thorough study conducted by the U.S. government, prior to Pearl Harbor, to determine whether the Japanese population on the West Coast would be a possible threat to U.S. security in the event Japan entered the war. It concluded definitively that there was complete loyalty of the Japanese American population to the government and the citizens of the United States and that the Japanese community (most of whom were American citizens)